An engineer is inspecting a self-attention layer and observes that for a given query token, the set of calculated relative position offsets (query_position - key_position) includes both positive and negative values. What can be concluded about the nature of this attention mechanism?

In a self-attention mechanism designed for a machine translation encoder, which processes an entire source sentence at once, the relative position offset between a query at position i and a key at position j (calculated as i - j) must always be greater than or equal to zero.

Choosing an Attention Mechanism for a Language Task